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In the 21st century, innovations have become an unquestioned sine qua non of everyday life. Our living conditions change rapidly, often without predictability, security, or critical reflexion. These changes easily turn into a form of political and social control of innovation-induced ruptures, keeping people on constant alert and making them abandon recently acquired practices for new ones. It can be argued that they represent a form of psychological coercion. Moreover, the growing pace of life-as-innovation, together with misguided assumptions and conclusions about life itself in the diversity of its local variations, produces new forms of inequality and misery among many societies around the globe. In the present paper, I explore how time, innovation, and values relate to each other in both academic life and life in general. I argue for prioritising well-informed reflexive works in the social sciences and the humanities against the pressures of time and frequently unfounded innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the results of a comparative study based on the interviews with leading French and Russian intellectuals and scholars (Khapaeva, 2005) . Initially focused on the phenomenon of translation in the social sciences and humanities over last 15 years, it gradually grew into a search for an explanation of the contemporary state of intellectual uncertainty, usually associated with the present-day crisis of social sciences and humanities. In particular, this paper attempts to contribute to an understanding of the dramatic changes undergone by the social sciences and humanities' conceptual apparatus over the last two decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]